Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica

About Alyx Dellamonica

After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.

Review Repost: The Lesser Dead, by @buehlmeister

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Stubby-RocketWith Halloween coming up any minute now, I thought I should reshare my Tor.com review of one of the scariest books I’ve read in recent years, Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead, a story of vampires fighting an exceedingly bloody sort of turf war in 1970s Manhattan. I read the book right around the time Kelly and I were in New York for NYC ComicCon, which added weird levels to the creepfest: I was literally walking through the places where the carnage had taken place.

Here’s a snippet from the review:

The story winds to and fro like a river on the plains, rounding past Joey’s short past as a living human being, drifting through the events which brought him into conflict with Margaret, sharing the tale of his death and rebirth. We get nifty little glimpses of life in the underworld, a sense of the pack’s power dynamics, and as a bonus we get to relive the age of disco. In the process, it’s all too easy to become fond of the pack, even more so when the vampires track down the feral children and begin the difficult process of teaching them table manners. The only thing better would be if Joey brought home a box of puppies.

And the cover!

Have a safe and spooky weekend, everyone!

An Inksplanation from author @EmmieMears

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img_9012Emmie Mears’s most recent novel A Hall of Keys and No Doors is about magic keys and grief and what we can and cannot control. The book mentioned in this interview, Look to the Sun, is about the subtle magic of stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others. It comes out 15 November and is available for preorder now. Here’s what they say about this amazing tree:

I spent a decade wanting tattoos before I got any, and then my first one was a whim.

When I got married the first time, I picked out a ring that had deep meaning for me: a white gold band with ogham writing that said “my love on you” in Gaelic. That ring held no meaning for my husband–he never got my desire to move back to Scotland or how much that place felt like home for me. The day our divorce finalised, I decided in the car on the way home and got those ogham words tattooed on my arm.
A couple months later, I got started on the big piece, the back piece. From my lumbar region to just below my ear, I have a tree that stretches asymmetrically up my back. At the top is a trio of crows in flight, in silhouette. Down the trunk is more ogham, this bit reading “remember where you came from.”
***
I can still remember the smell of Simple Green, and it still makes me want to urp.
For most of my childhood, my family was so poor that we inhabited tiny log cabins with little to no plumbing. I shared a room with my mother that we rented from a woman in Portland. Later, I lived for months at a time in a tent on a patch of land. After that, in an actual barn we tried to make into a cabin. Most of those places had no functioning toilet. When I tell people that I grew up without a toilet, I get a lot of strange looks.
We used to dump Simple Green into the five gallon bucket we used as “the pot”.
It was my job to empty it.
***
Both my biological parents have had troubled lives. I’ve collected parental figures along the way, from my mother’s long term partner who I still see as my second mum to my step-dad, to a woman called Donna who took me under her wing in our church before cancer killed her, to families that gave me a place to stay when I could not stay at home (or when home got taken out from under us).
For this among many reasons, any desire I had to have children fell away from me in my early twenties. I’ve taken care of myself since I was thirteen. I staged my exit from home beginning at sixteen. At thirty-one, I have a healthy, loving relationship. A flushing toilet. (Booyah!) Two kitties.
My partner and I are about to move to Scotland.
***
In my forthcoming novel, Look to the Sun, I found myself heavily identifying with Beo, one of the POV characters. His tattoo covers his forearm and is the first major connection between Beo and Rose, the other POV character and part of the poly romance in the book.
Like me, Beo has survived abusive relationships. Like me, he decided he wanted to wear his stories in his skin.
Tattoos are intensely personal things most of the time. They’re with us foreverish. But no matter how obscure they seem to be, they communicate part of our inner lives with the outside world. Just like Rose recognises the design of Beo’s tattoo as being from her all-time favourite book, I have people recognise the ogham writing on my arm or ask me about the vein-like branches that cover my shoulder.
Tattoos are just another way of telling stories.
 
***
A year from now, my partner and I will (dog willing) be ensconced in a Glasgow flat, having done something I’ve been trying to do for thirteen years.
***
I sometimes forget that my back is covered in ink.
Two of my great aunts, on opposite sides of my family, have spent decades combing through genealogical records about our family. On both sides, there is a lot of strong oral tradition and a lot of familial history that has been passed down for generations. Much of it eludes what documentation any of us have been able to find.
My family on both sides is insistent that we came from Scotland, from Wales. Sometimes by way of Ireland (this much is documented), sometimes appearing with a wave of other immigrants after a significant historical event (like Culloden) (this is fuzzier).
I had my DNA run through the system at Ancestry.com. After 40+ moves on American soil and a tendency to splutter when someone asks me where I’m from, that question spurs a small internal tornado: do I say Texas, where I was born but spent less than three months? Arkansas? Alaska, where I was a toddler? Oregon maybe? Montana, where I graduated high school? Maryland, where I’ve technically spent the most time? I still never know. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and see the branches there and only then remember that tattoo.
Before this last year, I was happiest in Poland. But Poland would not welcome my queer, trans self now. My happiness when I lived in Scotland was more transitive itself. I never had a flat there, just a bunk bed and a room full of loved ones who ate and slept and traveled and learned together.
But of all the places I’ve lived, Scotland was always home. I don’t know if it is where I came from. That DNA test said my DNA is Scandinavian. Which, hey. I mean, the Vikings got around. My aunts have traced our family back centuries and there’s not a Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish name to be found among the Welsh and Scottish and English and German ones. It doesn’t really matter–Scotland is a welcoming place for those who seek to make their homes there.
Which brings that second tattoo back to the first one: my love on you. And, more ephemerally, to the second tattoo’s deeper meaning.
I got that first armband on a whim, but I got it because I needed the meaning. It was important for me to affirm that to myself, that I deserve self-love. I stayed in my marriage longer than I ought to have done because I forgot that I could love myself.
As for the other, “remember where you came from”, it’s less about geography and more about self. It is the germinating seed that grows our tree. The branches we reach upward and the roots we sink into soil. We came from stars and live by the light of one. What a miraculous thing.
These first two tattoos cover a lot of me, but I’ve got a lot of canvas left to explore.
You can find Emmie on Twitter, Facebook, and their website.

About this post: Inksplanations (and variations thereon) is the name for a series of short interviews where I ask genre writers about their tattoos. Why they got them, what they mean, how getting ink did or didn’t change them–any and all of these topics are fair game. What drives a literary artist to literally become canvas for an image or epigram? Did they get what they were seeking? I wanted to know, especially after I got my 2016 poppies from Toronto artist Lorena Lorenzo at Blackline Studio, and so I did what any curious writer would do. I asked!

 Next week we’ll have Fran Wilde, answering the same question.

Inksplanations: Why I bought myself flowers for 2016

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img_0857It was a Saturday sometime in August and I was on Queen Street, schlepping home the sandwich we favor for weekend lunch. The weather was glorious, late-summer heat and all the sun you could wish for. Thanks to the particular perversity of the retail ecosystem, one of the clothing boutiques had a fall coat in the window.

Friends, humans, countrymen, this was an exceedingly awesome coat. I don’t remember what it looked like, because… well, I never remember what things look like. But I do remember knowing it would’ve looked flat-out smashing on me. I absolutely believe that if I’d had cute shoes and a dusting of snow in my hair, along with that coat, Dr. Who would have spontaneously a) become real; b) materialized in Toronto; c) offered me a gig as the TARDIS’s first Canadian Companion. Which all things considered wouldn’t have been 100% great. So much danger! All that yelling! Daleks! But I digress.

I didn’t use to have an eye for cute coats or charming frocks, or to be honest much interest. But there it was, adorable as fuck, siren-songing with wooly autumn vigor, in defiance of the heat and humidity, and because I tend to squirrel my spending money away, I could have walked in right then and there and claimed it for my own.

The internal chorus kicked in: Weren’t you kind of thinking about a tattoo?

Well, maybe. Yeah. No. Yeah. Like, okay, but for my next divisible-by-ten birthday?

Which is years off. Are you looking at that fucking coat? OMG, buy it, buy it!

But that artist I saw on Instagram…

On the one hand, she’s not likely to be available before you are. in fact, fifty. On the other, you can save up tattoo money again by 2018.

Such was the power of the coat that the yammering went back and forth for rawther a long while before a louder, deeper and utterly certain voice said: Hey! You are having an amazing year. Celebrate properly, mark the occasion with blood and pain and beauty and screw this BS about waiting for a mere birthday.

Oh! I thought. I am having an amazing year!

By the time I got home, I’d decided to have someone zorch poppies into the flesh of my arm. I was sure enough by then that I actually told Kelly about the coat, which was an act of staggering generosity and considerable risk to the laws of physics, as it would also have looked so mind-bogglingly incredible on my wife that everyone standing within fifty feet of her would probably have become invisible, possibly forever.  Unbeknownst to us, the boutique was going broke at pretty much that exact moment… and so it was not to be. You can thank market forces for your continued existence on the visual spectrum.

Anyway. I’ve blogged about all the amazing travel experiences I had in 2016. Those experiences came with so many museums, meals, meetings with loved ones, and marvels! But there has even more this year. Embarrassments of riches. My fifth novel, The Nature of a Pirate–which also represents my first completed and published trilogy–will be out from Tor Books in December. Its predecessor, A Daughter of No Nation, won the Aurora Award. I had not one but three incredible teaching opportunities and hit them all out of the park. I gave a talk on terraforming, “How We Became LV426” at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium this year, an event whose headliner was Margaret Atwood. I co-edited my first anthology, Heiresses of Russ 2016, with Steve Berman. There were so many great things, in fact, that I am probably forgetting four or ten or a dozen more.

Atop it all, I got to watch Kelly’s career blossom, with a spectacular list of stories published that turned into an equally spectacular list of award nominations, Year’s Best selections, translations, kudos, great reviews, and an Aurora Award in the short fiction category for Waters of Versailles.

So! A tattoo to celebrate, courtesy the remarkable Lorena Lorenzo of Blackline Studios on King Street. In the photo above, Chinchilla’s a little bored with the whole concept. I, on the other hand, am delighted with it. I’ll talk about the design, and why poppies, sometime in the not too distant. But as part of the fun I’m also going to interview some writers about their tattoos. The when, the why, the symbolism… well, really, whatever they want to tell you about their ink is up to them. You’ll see Inksplain interviews here at Planetalyx starting this Wednesday with an essay by Emmie Mears. I hope you enjoy them. And if you have any questions about the poppies, the artist, or my amazing 2016, just go ahead and let me know.

Recent Review Snippet – A Feast of Sorrows, by @AngelaSlatter

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Stubby-RocketI haven’t been writing a lot of reviews for Tor.com lately, but recently I have done a couple, and the newest of these is up now. It’s for Angela Slatter’s first US collection, A Feast of Sorrows, and here’s a bit of what I had to say.

In A Feast of Sorrows, the magic of well-made things is a motif that runs throughout its various tales. The work—baking, sewing, candlemaking, all by talented artisans—has its echo here in the real world in Slatter’s finely wrought paragraphs, and the measured unfolding of each story. There is a sense of the exquisite in the writing here, of plots laid down like pearls on a string.

Here’s the cover–isn’t it beautiful?

Oh, the places I’ve been in 2016!

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2016 has already been a spectacular year for me on so many fronts, the most obvious of which has been travel. Our recent Thanksgiving jaunt to Alberta was the latest in a run of delightful and exciting trips. In truth, Kelly and I have never gone as far or left home as often as we did this year.

Counting up chronologically and by city, here’s the list:

February: Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco. (I was on the A Daughter of No Nation book tour. Kelly, meanwhile, went to Boston for Boskone.)

March: Our London adventure!

(whee, it’s my Big Ben shaped friend!)

May: Chicago (Nebula Awards Banquet.)

August: Kansas City (World Science Fiction Convention.)

September: Ottawa (CanCon) and Los Angeles.

Cuddle break! Going nuts over art for hours on end is hard work! @kellyoyo

(Snuggle selfie at the Getty Museum)
And now, finally, October: Calgary, Hinton, Jasper (Family Thanksgiving.)

There were also countless short jaunts to conventions like Ad Astra, and readings in Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo. There’ll be one or two more of those, but as the year winds down we’re going to settle into grooving on Toronto and saving up energy and resources for another big delightful thing, scheduled about six months hence. I’ll tell you all about that some other day.